I’ve been wrong. I’ve argued that destroying America’s educational infrastructure and promoting stupid ideas like creationism will inevitably erode our country’s competitive standing in the world marketplace. I’ve always thought the only way to correct that was to improve public education — but there’s an alternative. Make other countries stupider!

Romania’s withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children’s understanding of how the world came into being.

Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.

It puts this well-known chart in perspective. You might think that we ought to be struggling to climb the ladder and move from second to the last to the top by working hard and doing better than those other countries, but no — all we have to do is export some of our poisonous stupidity to other nations, and watch them fall below us.

We did it with Turkey — they borrowed heavily from teams of creationist “arkeologists” who visited their country to search for a big boat dumped on Mt Ararat by a world wide flood. Romania is next — in a few years, we’ll be third from the bottom without even working at it.

I bet it would be easy to knock tiny Iceland off its perch. A little free television programming, a faith-based initiative to send teams of televangelists on tour, a few Mormon and Jehovah’s Witnesses in missionary squads…yeah, it would be far easier to destroy their brains than to improve our own.

Cynthia Dunbar has written a book. It’s typical wingnut nonsense: it “refers to public education as ‘a subtly deceptive tool of perversion’ and calls the establishment of public schools unconstitutional and ‘tyrannical.’” It goes further and says that…

…she believes public schools are unconstitutional because they undermine the scriptural authority of families to direct their children’s education. Her own children have been privately educated and home-schooled.

Typical and unsurprising so far. It’s a shame that she’s abusing the intellectual development of her own children, but unfortunately, she has that right. At least she’s not harming other kids…uh, wait a moment.

Cynthia Dunbar is on the Texas State Board of Education.

Dunbar has served as the state board’s District 10 representative since 2006. Her district covers 16 counties in Southeast Texas, including half of Travis County. She is a member of the board’s instruction committee, which oversees curriculum and graduation requirements, student assessment programs, library standards, and the selection of textbooks.

America’s method of governing public education is severely broken when a kook and hater of public schools like this can be one of the top administrators of educational policy in one of the largest public school systems we have. And that she is evaluating textbooks and curriculum…I am appalled.

The Texas Freedom Network is on the case. I think we need something deeper than just booting this destructive lunatic off the board of education, though — we need sweeping structural change all across the country so that the only people put in charge of schools are those who have an interest in making them better. Do you think a corporation, for instance, would succeed if it promoted people to positions of power who openly admitted that all they wanted to do was destroy the company from within?

A columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer is quite irate about the fact that we squelched the zoo/creation museum deal. If you read his article, you’ll discover a theme.

The live Nativity at the Creation Museum will have an actual, living, cud-chewing camel. Frightening.

There will also be goats and sheep. Terrifying.

Cuddly lambs might seem harmless to the average visitor, but some people are scared witless by the possibility that some innocent, devout secularist could accidentally wander onto the grounds of the Creation Museum and get exposed to radioactive Christianity or other dangerous ideas that should be outlawed.

The writer, Peter Bronson, hammers on this idea over and over — that scientists are afraid of creationists. By imputing a false motive to our actions, he goes farther and farther astray into never-never land, building up this astonishingly elaborate house of cards.

He does get one part halfway correct, though. He quotes another article on the Enquirer:

“Asking me to ‘tolerate’ this kind of worldview is akin to asking me to ‘tolerate’ illiteracy. Both are problems of education and intelligence. Creationist thought is … naïve, it is anti-intellectual, and it harkens back to pre-enlightenment thinking. I don’t have any tolerance for that.”

Got that? Creationists are stupid, illiterate, naïve and backward.

Naïve and backward is quite correct; they are promoting bad old ideas that have long been disproven. I do not think creationists are stupid — creationism is a deficit that you can overcome — and most are literate to some degree. If only Mr Bronson actually understood what he wrote, because it explains so much more than his “fear” thesis. We react as we do to the proposals of creationists because they are wrong. We aren’t afraid of such absurdities at all, it’s more of an intellectual commitment to addressing falsehoods.

Once again, though, the creationists have caught me brandishing my cyber pistol.

“It’s a little sad that the zoo would cave in to a cyber war,” Ham said. He believes most of the protests came from people who don’t live anywhere near Cincinnati – instigated by P.Z. Myers of Minnesota, a “godless liberal” blogger-atheist who has made a hobby of spiteful attacks on Christians, Christmas and the Creation Museum.

“They’re the ones who are being intolerant,” Ham said. “We’re not afraid of creationists going to the Zoo and seeing their messages about evolution. People have to stand on their own beliefs. It’s not up to us to say you can’t go to this place or that place.

And a fine, entertaining hobby it is, too.

And they make it so easy when they mischaracterize everything so grossly. Did anyone say people can’t go to the Creation Museum? Did anyone block the ability of the Creation Museum to sell tickets? Is anyone afraid of the Big Dumb Ham? Why, no. All that happened is that they were told they can’t borrow the good name of a legitimate educational and scientific institution when they are shilling for their museum. That’s it.

It makes me wonder: If the science is so unshakeable, what are they afraid of? Why wouldn’t they welcome a debate? Why not encourage open-minded exploration? Isn’t that what scientific inquiry is all about?

Again, abandon that premise. We are not afraid. The real issue is that this is a settled scientific question, long resolved and with growing evidential support, and there is little point in continuing the discussion.

Anyone who has had kids knows this situation: when they discover the word “why”, they learn that it is a tool for starting an unending conversation. Give ’em an answer, and they just say “why” again; explain that, and it’s “why” again; the game keeps going until the adult gives up in exasperation. We all know that the kid is not trying to think or get a complete answer — he just wants attention. We can answer for a while with patience, but at some point we have to stop and insist that the child exhibit a little more honest curiousity to trigger more answers.

Creationists passed the point of honest inquiry long ago. I would suggest to Mr Bronson that he go through his little essay and try replacing every instance of the word “afraid” with “exasperated” and he might see his way through to a little more truth.

Or maybe not. The rest of his essay reveals that honesty is not a word he’s interested in.

The obvious adult answer to the protesters is simple: If you don’t like it, don’t go. Buy your ticket to the zoo and enjoy the Festival of Lights. Your experience will not be contaminated by the opportunity to see the Creation Museum’s live Nativity. There is no proven scientific risk of catching contagious Christianity from merely touching a ticket.

But it seems like the only thing Americans have really perfected in the past 30 years is the art of being mortally offended by ridiculous trivialities. So here we go again. Some insecure secularists get scared by ideas they fear, and off we go – another brick wall of political correctness must be built to shield feeble minds from taboo thoughts and theories.

I suppose next they will try to ban Santa Claus because all that stuff about reindeer pulling his sleigh pulled across the sky has not been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal.

Christ would probably be outlawed too by the Secular Police, but his name’s on the holiday.

I repeat: nobody said you can’t go to the Creation Museum. Nobody is worried that you’ll catch Christianity from a poorly done pseudo-museum. Nobody is threatening to ban Santa Claus or Christianity, either. But these baseless accusations are just so useful to inflame the martyr gland of the poor Christian majority. I have to feel sorry for them — their sense of self-worth seems to reside in a belief that they are persecuted for their beliefs, and it’s just so hard to maintain when you’re a dominant majority trying to force-feed religious absurdities on people with educations.

Seth Godin is a marketing guy, and he recently turned his eye to the evolution-creation wars and offered a marketing perspective. That’s useful, but I don’t think he looked deeply enough, and his suggestions don’t really help much. In particular, he compares the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution to Newton’s “law of gravity” and tries to extract a message about why one is unquestioned and the other is not.

1. If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.

Nobody had a seriously described theory of gravity before Newton named it. No one walks around saying that they have a story about why we stick to the earth better than the gravity story. As a result, there was no existing story or worldview to overthrow. Naming something that people already believe in is very smart marketing.

Actually, there was an existing theory of gravity — several, in fact. The best known was Aristotle’s, who posited that there was a natural place where every object ideally wished to be located. For most solid objects, that ideal place was the center of the earth, and for less substantial objects, like steam and smoke, it was in the heavens, so everything was drawn naturally to it’s optimum destination unless hindered. Simple.

Newton’s laws were accepted by the common people without question because they didn’t know what they were. Ask anyone now, outside of a university at least, and you won’t get many who say ‘G•m₁•m₂/d²‘, or even understand that he quantitatively described the force of attraction between any two masses. It’s enough that he didn’t say something crazy, like that apples fall up, therefore it was OK.

Godin is right here. Everyone simply takes the force of gravity for granted, so hearing that some smart guy figured out how to calculate the exact magnitude of that force is unchallenging. Evolution is different. There are lots of creation myths around, all of them created out of a complete absence of evidence and describing past phenomenon of which the storytellers had no understanding, and evolution is directly challenging all of them with facts and evidence. So, sure, it makes for a harder sell. It’s not particularly helpful to be told that your product is hard to market, though: it’s the product we’ve got.

2. If the timeframe of the message of your marketing is longer than the attention span (or lifetime) of the person you are marketing to, you have your work cut out for you as well.

Evolution is really slow. Hard to demonstrate it in real time during a school board meeting. Gravity is instantaneous. Baseball players use it every day.

Baseball players do not, however, use Newton’s laws. People can hit a ball with a stick without using a single equation, and had been doing so long before Newton started scribbling. Try going into a schoolboard meeting and convincing them that students need to learn G•m₁•m₂/d², rather than that they have to fund supplies for athletics. Then you’ll discover how well established gravity is as an educational essential.

We also have some immediately persuasive props for evolution, too: fossils. Plop a dinosaur bone down in front of students, and it is immediately effective, and far more impressive than bouncing a ball. What you find, though, is immediacy is not enough. Creationists go to great lengths to contrive elaborate rationalizations to dismiss direct demonstrations. There’s something more going on.

Godin’s explanations miss the key points of contention.

Number one is human evolution. All those surveys of people’s attitudes towards evolution experience major shifts if the questions are simply reworded: ask whether they believe humans evolved from apes, and half of Americans will say no. Ask them if animals evolved from simpler forms, and the yes answers surge upwards by tens of percentage points. It is not an objection to evolution in principle, but to evolution as an explanation of their personal history. I’m sure there’s a marketing principle to be stated there.

The second objection is to chance and the lack of purpose. People really, desperately want there to be a personal agency to causality — they become utterly irrational about it all if you try to imply that no, fate, destiny, and ultimate cosmic purpose guided them to their mate, for instance. It couldn’t have been just chance. I suspect this is a consequence of the first contention: people want to believe that they are important agents in the universe, and one of the implications of evolution is that they aren’t.

If a marketing guy wants to help out with the evolution debates, those are ideas I’d like to know how to sell better.

I hadn’t realized that Roger Ebert had so far neglected to review Expelled, but he has now belatedly rectified that omission with a wonderfully scathing sneer at the movie. Here’s a taste:

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, depending on their complexions, they will look sunburned, red-splotched, oily, pale as a fish belly, orange, mottled, ashen, or too dark to be lighted in the same shot with a lighter skin. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

That is simply one revealing fragment. This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

I don’t think he liked it.

I know there are a lot of smart people at UW Madison who will be a bit dismayed to hear this: an IDEA chapter is forming in Madison. The IDEA clubs are the sad little organizations that the Intelligent Design wackaloons form on college campuses to spread their nonsense. They don’t seem very effective — they produce people like Casey Luskin and Sal Cordova, so one might argue that they actually help us by dumbing down the opposition — but they are kind of embarrassing to have around.

Anyway, this group is going to show some silly ID movies, “Where the evidence leads” (irreducible complexity proves evolution is wrong!) and “The Privileged Planet” (god is real because we don’t fall up!) on December 4, 10, 18 and in January at the Madison Public Library. They will have discussions afterwards in which they try to defend bogosity.

This could be great fun for the rational folk in Wisconsin. Get a group together, show up for the movie, and tear it down afterwards. Make ’em struggle, then go out for a celebratory beer afterwards. Report back if you do it!

---

MAJOR CORRECTION: this isn’t in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s Madison, South Dakota. They are easily confused, one is to the west of me, the other to the east.

This Madison contains Dakota State University — I’m sure there are avid science students there ready to play wack-a-mole, too.

We have made Ken Ham very sad. Yay, bonus!

“We are disappointed with the zoo’s decision and its impact on the families and visitors to the region who would have enjoyed taking advantage of this opportunity to make this a truly memorable Christmas,” said Answers in Genesis and Creation Museum founder and president Ken Ham. “Both the Creation Museum and the Cincinnati Zoo have put together spectacular Christmas displays, and we were excited to partner with them to promote these events in a combination package that would have been of great value to the community.”

“My family and I have been Cincinnati Zoo members for more than 10 years now, so I am also personally saddened that this organization I esteem so highly would find it necessary to back out of this relationship. At the same time, I have learned that the zoo received hundreds of complaints from what appear to be some very intolerant people, and so I understand the zoo’s perspective. Frankly, we are used to this kind of criticism from our opponents, and so being ‘expelled’ like this is not a huge surprise,” Ham continued.

…

“Our museum will continue to promote this excellent zoo on our website and also in the printed material we pass out inside the museum. We are committed to promoting regional tourism. It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith. Some of their comments on blogs reveal great intolerance for anything having to do with Christianity,” Ham added.

Awww, Ken just wanted to promote regional tourism. It wasn’t about trying to get validation from a legitimate research and educational institution, then. Right.

Let’s deal with some of his other claims.

• They were not attacked for their Christian faith — that is one of the most common dodges of liars and con men and other scoundrels, to hide behind the petticoats of generic ‘faith’, when what they’re actually being criticized for is lying and cheating. Ken Ham’s Creation ‘Museum’ is despised because it is a temple to falsehood.

• He keeps talking about expulsion and being expelled. Were we more successful than I could have imagined? Is the Creation ‘Museum’ closed? Are people hindered from visiting it? Have we blocked all ticket sales? No, unfortunately: all we’ve done is prevented a fraud from acquiring an entirely false veneer of authority by association. Save the martyr’s lament for a time when you haven’t been caught faking your credibility, Ken.

• I haven’t been to the Cincinnati Zoo myself, but I’m willing to accept Ham’s claim that it is an excellent organization (I shouldn’t, really. Plaudits from Ken Ham is like a good restaurant review from Jeffrey Dahmer.) The zoo’s reputation is precisely what Ham was trying to trade on by linking his awful little collection of lies to them. We have successfully defending that good reputation by exposing a tie that would have undermined it.

• The only intolerance here is an expectation of rigor, good science, and evidence-based reasoning from an educational institution. It’s what we’ll continue to promote, as long as hucksters like Ken Ham are out there trying to dilute our standards to allow biblical hogwash to stand on an equal footing with legitimate biology.

• Speaking for this blog, I don’t have intolerance for Christianity — I simply lack any respect at all for that grand hodge-podge of delusions. We leave the intolerance to Christians, who are historically expert at practicing it.

---

There’s more! Ken Ham has a long whiny blog post up today, complaining about those intolerant evolutionists, and making the same tired complaints I dealt with above.

I can tell that Ham is bit peeved that we squelched his attempt to ride on the coattails of the zoo.

“While we are saddened”…”These people basically worship Darwin–they worship evolution and cannot tolerate anyone who doesn’t agree with them!”…”Sad that someone with an atheistic agenda can cause a business relationship to be dissolved”…”they resort to censorship and underhanded campaigns”…”we are used to such integrity bashing.”

But he can’t let it slide without trying to pretend it was all alright.

Thank you, P.Z. Myers, for thousands of dollars’ worth of media promotion for our Bible-upholding museum! Actually, this will benefit the Creation Museum much more in the long run.

For the right effect, you have to imagine Ken Ham blubbering that out through his tears. Sure, he got media attention — all of it pointing out that he failed, that he’d tried to sneak in a link to a legitimate educational institution, and that a few people with blogs were able to put a stop to him. He looks rather pathetic, don’t you think?